Thursday, December 30, 2010

Causation and Succession—and Nonsuccession(ism)

Even the most diehard opponent of smoking bans cannot deny the obvious health risks caused by smoking and secondhand smoke exposure.

www.smokingstatistics.org

If A causes B, then B follows A, and if A occurs one hundred times, then B should follow one hundred times, following one hundred percent of the time, in full causal succession.

What then are we to make of the following alleged causes, effects and percentages of succession?

For example, we are told that smoking causes lung cancer, yet there are 1.2 billion smokers in the world, and 1.2 million new cases of lung cancer reported each year, making for a percentage of "succession" of at most one tenth of one percent per year.

And we are told that "second-hand smoke" causes a variety of ills, yet there are surely at least 1.2 billion people other than smokers in the world exposed to "second-hand smoke", and allegedly 600,000 people a year dying from it, making for a percentage of "succession" of at most one twentieth of one percent per year.

And now we are told that "third-hand smoke"—from clothing, walls, etc., which the horrifically-deadly (see above) tobacco smoke has touched—causes a variety of ills, although somewhat surprisingly even the Tobacco Warriors and their ever-willing army of "scientists", "doctors" and "statisticians" have apparently not yet been willing to commmit themselves to pretending that some yearly number of deaths result therefrom—and although that hasn't stopped a growing (and very familiar) hysterical drumbeat over the "health hazards" therefrom.

The figures originally given with regard to "second-hand smoking"—although they did not, of course, include or discuss the percentage of causal succession (and, indeed, you'll not find the raw figures, only massaged ones, still less any discussion of causal succession, on "informational" websites like thetruth.com, tobacco.org and smokingstatistics.org)—triggered a world-wide tidal-wave of persecution of tobacco-smokers, a global persecution without parallel since the great criminalizations/pathologizations of opium, alcohol, marijuana and cocaine.

But of course no such persecution would ever be launched on the basis of such "argument" that had not already been primed by decades of similar "arguments" intended to "justify" the hysterical persecution of smokers.

Over the smoke of burning leaves.

By the way, however did we survive all those millennia of campfires and hearths?